Spin Wave Majority Gates Cascading by Gilbert Damping Embracement (Can the Devil be turned into an Angel?)

Abstract

Recent theoretical and experimental spintronics developments clearly indicate that Spin Waves (SW) interference based Majority gates (MAJ3) open an alternative road towards ultra low-power circuit implementations potentially capable to outperform CMOS counterparts. However, hurdles still exist, e.g., gate cascading, as due to the very nature of SW interference MAJ3 gates are not input output coherent, i.e., produce output waves with different amplitudes corresponding to 'weak' and 'strong' majority, which precludes their direct cascading within the SW domain. State of the art designs address this issue by means of hybrid SW-CMOS systems that make use on domain converters, which are energy expensive and diminish if not nullify the ultra-low power promise of the SW-based computing paradigm. In this paper we propose a gate cascading technique that rely on the natural SW amplitude decay while propagating through a magnetic conduit. We demonstrate the concept by constructing the building block MAJ3(MAJ3(In-1, In-2, In-3), In-4, In-5) and verifying its correct behaviour by means of micromagnetic simulations. We evaluate the proposed design in terms of energy consumption, delay, and area, and our calculations indicate that, when compared with its domain conversion counterpart, our proposal consumes 49.5% less energy, at the expense of 48% area and 76.5% delay overhead, respectively.